Straight No Chaser - A Jazz Show

Abbey Lincoln (1930-2010)

Straight No Chaser is the place for jazz lovers (and those who will soon be jazz lovers) to enjoy podcasts with their favorite music and artists. Winner of the 2017 JazzTimes Readers' Poll for Best Podcast, your host Jeffrey Siegel will take you inside the world of jazz, from the new releases to the best festiva;s to remembrances of jazz legends.

One
of my favorite singers, Abbey Lincoln, has died in New York over
the weekend. She was 80 years old. She was not merely a singer, but
a songwriter, an actress, an advocate for civil rights, and a
participant in some of the most daring jazz recordings of the
1960’s..

As a jazz singer,
Ms. Lincoln traced her lineage to Billie Holiday and back to Bessie
Smith. She lacked the technical prowess of an Ella Fitzgerald or
Sarah Vaughan. She
rarely scatted or improvised on the melody line. Her vocal style
was built around her phrasing, interpretation of the lyrics and
emotion, drawing on her acting skills.She also stood out from other
jazz singers because she mostly performed her original songs rather
than relying on standards. She credited jazz pianist Thelonious
Monk for encouraging her to become a songwriter after she wrote a
lyric to his tune "Blue Monk" for her 1961 album, Straight Ahead.

Straight Ahead and her
1960 collaboration with her husband, the legendary drummer Max
Roach, We Insist! –
Freedom Now, represented her first great recordings.
Thirty years later, she had a brief renaissance in collaborations
with Stan Getz, Archie Shepp and Hank Jones, and most importantly,
her album A Turtle’s
Dream. That album, especially this seminal recording of
“Down Here On the Ground”, was praised by critic Stephen Holden in
one of
my favorite thought pieces on music:

Abbey Lincoln, whose singing
suggests Billie Holiday fortified by faith, explores the meaning of
life and death in her 1995 masterpiece, “A Turtle’s Dream.” Its
nine-minute centerpiece, “Down Here Below,” is her one-sided
conversation with a God she both reveres and questions in language
that transcends her usually singsongy verses. Leading her ensemble
of bass, drums, violin and viola, the pianist Kenny Barron delivers
a sublime extended solo that matches the intensity of Ms. Lincoln’s
voice, hovering on the edge of rapture and tears. I’ve seen Ms.
Lincoln perform the song in concert several times, but no
performance came close to the one captured on this
record.

Her last album of
new material, Abbey
Sings Abbey was released in 2007.